I have moved this blog to the newly self-hosted blog on my server. The new blog is much better for the readers. It has bigger fonts and no distractions.
The new link is here: http://www.h4ck3r.org/blog/

One of the best ways to succeed is surrounding yourself with successful or talented people. You should make friends with them, like them and learn from them, however, do not ever admire them.

Instead, envy them.

They are more successful than you. By envying them, you have a great motivation to learn harder and work harder with the hope that someday you will be in their league.
On the other hand, you admire somebody only when in deep down of your mind, you know that it is impossible for you to be like them. In other words, you admit your own defeat.

Given a group of people that you wish you had their successes:
If you envy all of them then this is the best case. It means you will be like them someday.
The second case, if you admire them while still are little jealous. This is worse but still ok. You still have some chances to be like them.
Lastly, if you truly admire them without even a smallest envy, then, my friend, you are doomed forever.

Consider these situations:
You are walking in a dark street at night to get home.
You are in the car of your friend and he is driving too fast.
You are in the last moment of your life.
Before read further, you should spend a moment to think about this question: What do the three situations above have in common?
————————–
If you can’t figure it out, the answer is, you do not know what kind of things are going to happen next. They are still unknown, but your mind is telling you that they won’t be good things.

In all three situations above, anything may happen: you might be suddenly attacked by a robber, the car might bump into something and in the last case, your soul might be torn apart by the Death.

And this is one of the worst fears of human beings: the fear of the unknown.

The Consequence

Why fear of the unknown is bad? It keeps you worrying about things that either have a small chance of occurrence (you might be attacked) or things you have no control over (death). And eventually, it completely wears you out.

Aside from those extreme examples, fear of the unknown often prevents you from switching to a better job, getting to know a new friend or taking advantage of new opportunities to succeed.

Some thoughts

Regarding to death, religions do a great job of helping people in fighting this fear. They make the unknown become the known: “death is just a doorway to heaven.” Once people believe that, they no longer worry about what will happen with them after they die, because they know the gate of heaven is waiting for them.

However, reality proves that religions still can’t totally remove all uncertainties behind death from their followers: even people who firmly believe in heaven don’t want to die to go there. After all, how many people has been able to come back from heaven to tell the story of how it looks like?

The internet is a good place and also, ironically, a bad place for work.
By good place, I mean most of us can greatly benefit from the Internet thanks to its huge source of information. Being a programmer, I heavily rely on the webs to help me with my day-to-day job. When I have a problem need to be solved , a quick google search often saves me hours of trying to figure it out myself.

On the other hand, the internet also has its downside. Social networks, instant messengers, online news and entertainment, all these kinds attractive stuff are just one click away. And most of us seem not to be able to resist the urge of following this infinite loop of distraction.

One thing that most of us don’t realize that the Internet is one of the most distracting our mankind has ever invented. Yes, it is much worse than video games or TV. How is that possible? Let me explain.

If you playing games on a PlayStation 3 or watching TV for three hours straight, you know exactly that you are spending time on entertainment. And you will immediately know that you have been playing/watching too much.

But, on a computer, that’s a totally different story. You can spend hours browsing Facebook, reading online news and still feel like you are just taking a “quick” break from your work. And of course, with many of us, there are often not just one “quick” break in a typical work day. The ugly thing here is, even you just spent two hours or more in those kind of non-work related activities, by the end of the day, you still feel like you have been doing a full eight hours of work. There is no clear boundary between working and playing when it comes to a computer with high-speed internet connection.

So, how are we going to solve this problem? In my situation, I can not just unplug the cable to disconnect from the internet. As a programmer, I need internet to do my job. So instead, I put all websites that I consider time-consuming into a blacklist, then ban all of them from my computer.

What is the result of this? Every time my mind wanders and I type “facebook.com” in the browser, I get a friendly reminder like this 😉

Also, I moved the rest of news reading and other non-work related activities to my Ipad. The Ipad is a great device for those kinds of stuff. By using this trick, I now have a much clearer sense of how much time I spend on work and entertainment.

Are you aware of any other method that help us stay away from distractions?

In this social media era, a large percentage of information is in form of writing. Still, there are a lot of people who don’t write. Why? There are many reasons. But, in my opinion, one of the most common causes is we all want perfection in our writing.

We want everything in our post to be perfect. Nothing is more embarrassing than writing a blog entry with full grammar mistakes and publishing it under our very own name. People will laugh at our faces once they see it. However, since we don’t write often enough, we can’t have a blog post that we truly satisfy. So finally, we decide it’s better not to write anything. End of story.

However, our world does not and should not work that way. Stop reading and take a look at everything around us right now. Can you name anything that is perfect? I bet you can’t.

Let’s take it further. Suppose that after trying very very hard, you find a thing which, in your opinion, is almost perfect. Unfortunately, somebody can always tell you that, that thing is no way close to their image of perfection.

You may ask, Why? One simple explanation is because their definition of perfection is different from your definition of perfection and, in turn, differs from mine. Perfection itself does not exist.

So why would you have to bother about how other people may think of your writing?

Just write! Do not wait for perfection, because it will never come.
But what to write? My answer is just write anything that pops in your mind. Any topic is OK as long as you start writing it.

And you know what? A blog entry, even short, conveys way more meaning than a ton of empty Facebook statuses. And as a friend of yours, I care about it.